


Good for Something

by onnenlintu



Series: The Kasvatus Series [1]
Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 13:52:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13614702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onnenlintu/pseuds/onnenlintu
Summary: Sometimes grief takes a while to manifest, and sometimes those close to us don't make coping any easier.





	Good for Something

"That was the last sign we saw of her. By the time I had reached the shore, she was dead."

Onni didn't remove his gaze from the point somewhere behind Lalli's head he had fixed it on before the explanation started. There was nothing to add. Lalli's report of the situation was as unceremonious, he guessed, as his sister's death had been. He felt his eyes sting again and blinked it back.  
  
In the weeks of waiting while the others were quarantined, he had told himself that part of the reason he had expressed nothing to the people around him was because he couldn't find the words. It was indeed a unique hell, feeling his world suddenly become devoid of what he had centred it on for the last decade, as abruptly empty as an adeptly cored apple, then having only his blunt, utilitarian Icelandic to express it in. The Swedish couple, they'd tried once they learned what had happened, and he supposed it wasn't their fault it just felt more and more surreal the more they rephrased and tried to find anything they could do for him. How could words so bent out of shape by his mouth carry the meaning? _Dauða_ \- it sounded wrong for what had happened to her, blunt and unpronounceable and at best a shorthand for something real, like the labels on Siv's research folders. A meaningless noise. He had told himself that when Lalli was here, finally, perhaps something would come. But as he stared at the wall, all he could say was "I see."

He forced himself to look at Lalli for a moment and found his expression as inscrutable as ever. He was still standing there, as if waiting for something. Onni inhaled and found the first words to come out to be "When are we going back to Keuruu?"

Those were definitely not the right ones. Lalli's face, always guarded, lost a hint of something he hadn't even noticed was there before. "I still need to give a lot of reports. There's things to tie up. Not for several days, I think. Ask the aunt or the uncle. Nobody tells me anything."

Onni trained his gaze on the wall again. "Okay."

Lalli was turning and leaving, and somewhere in the background the potatoes were boiling over. Oh yes. Torbjörn had left him here to watch those. In the few minutes since Lalli had finally found him and begun to report back, he had totally forgotten. He rectified the situation in a mechanical daze and continued to poke them listlessly until they seemed about done. Was there anything on this forsaken earth he was good for? Not for the first time, he came to the conclusion that the answer was a resounding no.

*

Emil jumped as Lalli entered the room they'd been put in together with uncharacteristic noise and force. He quickly put away the copy of _Finska för nybörjare_ he had managed to beg Siv to get to him while he was still in quarantine - he supposed Lalli wouldn't know what he was doing anyway, but was still strangely embarrassed about it - and turned to face him. Lalli had planted his face against the wall and was leaning into it with an expression that nobody could mistake for anything but internal screaming. Emil opened his mouth to speak. He closed it again. He opened it again. He took a breath. "...Lalli?"

Still facing the wall, Lalli muttered a stream of pained syllables that Emil suspected would still be nigh on incomprehensible even were he not talking into a panel of wood. He caught enough cursing and mentions of Onni's name to figure out that whatever conversation he'd managed to have with his cousin, it hadn't gone well. Well, shit. Lalli turned, and after an extremely clear "why in fuck...!" Emil was lost again. He stood there without interrupting, though, and let Lalli yell, and when Lalli had run out of ways to cycle through the many, many curses the Finnish language seemed to contain, he stepped forward and smoothed his hair off his face. Lalli just stared at him, brokenly miserable and seething with enough raw anger and frustration to boil an egg. In the few weeks since he had woken up, he still didn't seem to really accept they had returned to the struggle to communicate in words. Emil looked at his shoes and tried to remember how in the hell to formulate questions that didn't contain a what or a where. "Onni saying bad." No. Fuck. " _Did_ Onni _say_ bad?" Was that it?

Judging by the incredulous look Lalli was giving him, perhaps not. He was on the point of trying to work out how to apologise for trying when Lalli replied, sounding out each word like he was talking to a particularly slow child, with something about Onni saying... something? No. Not saying something. Emil tried to clarify. "Nothing? Does he say nothing?" Lalli squeezed his eyes shut and nodded, repeating Emil's phrase back to him. "Nothing".

Well. Alright then. Having gleaned this information, Emil wasn't sure what else he could do. He returned to biting his lip and staring at his shoes and realising that, language barrier or not, he had no idea what to say in this situation. He heard Lalli sigh deeply and looked up towards his face. He still looked intensely miserable, and the fading heat of his anger left an emptiness in the air. Somewhere, a clock ticked, and clinking noises carried through the house from the kitchen. It broke up the silence just enough to mark the moment as a long one. Without changing his expression, Lalli opened his eyes to meet Emil's gaze and quietly mirrored his earlier action, tucking one of his thick golden waves behind his ear. He told Emil not to do something. From the tone of it it sounded like he was being told not to worry. Of course he was going to worry. The clinking noises in the kitchen transformed into the sound of Torbjörn banging on a pan and Emil's three cousins all bursting out of a room to rampage down the stairs. "Dinner!"

*

Onni shoveled dinner into his mouth with an automatically regular motion that might have been intended to look like actual interest in the food. Emil was occupied containing the behaviour of the horrible children. Siv and Torbjörn were still deep in conversation, perhaps hashing out more details of the next week that nobody would bother to tell him until the last minute. Lalli picked at his food, aware that he would be hungry later if he didn't eat, unable to care. Occasionally he got a glance from Emil that said he had either not understood or had chosen to ignore his request not to worry about him. If he'd known how dismissive Onni had been, and how much he deserved it, he wouldn't bother. The few looks Lalli dared to send Onni's way had gone unmet. Of course. Would he have been able to look someone in the eye, after that person had so badly failed his only sister? How was he meant to take Onni's near-silence, except as a glaring indictment of that failure? Lalli swallowed down the guilt and the bile that were rising through his body and realised there was no way he was going to manage to eat any of this. Silently pushing his plate towards the ravenous children, he muttered a quiet "tack" at Siv and Torbjörn before hurrying back upstairs.

Once he'd made it back to the room he and Emil shared – he was thankful that at least Reynir had been put up somewhere else - it took all his effort not to scream. He settled for punching the thin pillow he'd been given and cursing under his breath, first while desperately trying not to cry, then while crying in long, quiet sobs that made his body shiver and his throat sting. He curled up into a ball and for the first time since finding Tuuri's breath mask on the ground - the split second of blankness, the inevitability of what it meant carving through reality like a scythe - the keenness of loss truly broke through. Not just of Tuuri, now, but of Onni and all the respect and support Lalli had earned from him over the years. He saw with crystal clarity that his life would always be an exercise in being orphaned, in the futility of preserving what you love against the world, over and over and over. Cursed to know it was futile but still feel it. _Tuuri_. What was the point of the stupid books if people like Tuuri were just going to die? He turned over endless similar thoughts in his head, some making more and some less sense, but all leading into the same thick, infected forest of despair. As inevitably as a bright forest river ending up in the cold of the sea. As inevitable as drowning in that same sea.

Nothing in the world could have made him feel worse than he did, except, of course, for what happened next.

There wasn't much more heartbreak to be had, but the look on Emil's face when he cracked open the door, leading with a lamp and a small plate of sandwich meat, and saw Lalli curled up sobbing on his mattress somehow provided it. Lalli just stared at him, fresh tears of loss and shame and exhaustion springing to his eyes. His stomach lurched at the prospect of being plied with more clumsy questions he couldn’t possibly answer, but Emil just stood frozen in the door for a moment, then with eyes as bright and round as the moon, quietly closed it behind him and came to sit down in front of Lalli. He put the sandwich meat on the floor next to Lalli. "Yours", he whispered. In Finnish. He'd been trying so much harder since they'd had to make it back together, but even the two syllables of that basic word caught the dancing lilt that made him nearly impossible to understand half the time. Lalli had wondered a few times why he was still trying, even now that they would be seperated soon. Nobody spoke Finnish in Sweden, or so he'd heard. From Tuuri. _Tuuri_. And here it came again.

Emil pulling the sleeve of his jumper - big and brightly patterned with snowflakes and little deer Siv had lovingly worked a few winters prior - over his hand and wiping the tears from Lalli's cheek filled him with a mix of hot shame and guilt. He sniffled and hiccupped and cursed the fact that there wasn't even any dignity left in this scenario. Emil just kept wiping the tears away as they came, seemingly not caring that by now his own cheeks were wet. _Why is_ he _crying?_ Eventually, Emil's damp wool-covered hands came to rest on Lalli's cheeks, cupping his face, and Lalli realised he had run out of both tears and energy. Then Emil was biting his lip, and making vague "stay here" gestures, and ducking out of the room before returning with a large mug of water, which Lalli drank down gratefully before noticing that the sandwich meat was still there. He took a bite of one slice, mostly because it seemed like the thing to do now, then bolted the rest down as the taste reminded his body what hunger was. Emil stood there, awkwardly watching him, then asked something in Swedish while gesturing to the light. Lalli nodded. Sure, it was early still, but he knew that in the morning the three demons who lived here would be coming for him. Neither of them spoke again before they managed to sleep, backs to each other, lost in seperate dreams.

*

Onni was sat in the kitchen again, pretending to do some puzzle in the newspaper. Torbjörn had tried to explain the point of the number puzzles that they made for the population of Mora every week, but Onni was quite sure he would never truly understand it. Siv was drinking blackcurrant leaf tea and alternating between long stretches of wordless contemplation and scratching down a few notes in a little book. Her presence wasn't offensive, but Onni still wished more than anything that he could be anywhere but this house.

The silence was broken by that Swedish boy - he gathered this was the "friend" Lalli had made on the trip, and he had to say he did not really respect his cousin's judgement there - coming down the stairs and into the kitchen, going to cut himself a slice of bread, and stopping mid-slice as he noticed Onni's glowering presence. The ensuing Swedish conversation between Siv and her nephew was, of course, incomprehensible but Onni could tell based on the gesturing that it was quite animated and that he was meant to be involved somehow. Ugh. Onni leaned forwards. "Should I ask for a translation?"

Siv leaned back in her chair. "He has some things he thinks you should know and which I feel would be a bit presumptuous to say in the first place."

Onni stared at the boy, and the set of his jaw, and the abandoned bread loaf beside him, and told Siv that whatever it was, he might as well hear it.

The look on his face provided all the translation Onni needed when he opened with " _ditt satans as, hur fan kunde du?!_ ", and based on the body language the boy continued with, he imagined that Siv's intermittent translation was an extremely tactful one. Nonetheless, the content of the words hit him like a punch in the gut.

"He says that whatever you and Lalli are normally like, you clearly don’t appreciate - his words, not mine! - how he risked his life to stay behind for your sister and make sure... whatever needed to happen, happened. And that this is what led to the two of them walking through territory where the others had already woken up the beasts, why Lalli had to fight so hard he was cast out of his body..."

Siv looked back at Emil, waiting to hear if there was any more. Onni stared down at the table. Well, she hadn’t been wrong to call it presumptuous. Still, his only response was to keep staring anywhere other than a human face, so it was followed by more, quieter and less punctuated by swearing. "Um... he saw how Lalli was in the days before she died, and ah... even after she was dead, he did all he could for her. He wouldn't rest until he knew it was how it should be."

Distantly, Onni began to realise that whatever reaction Lalli had shared with his friend yesterday, it might have been enough to actually justify what he was being subjected to now.

Siv said something to Emil and looked quite emotional herself. The way she raised her hands said very clearly that she wasn’t doing this anymore. Emil nodded, and turned to Onni. Ignoring Onni’s glowering, he said - in halting Finnish - "Go and say... on him. To him. Something." Onni and Siv both blinked, and Onni instinctively replied in Finnish. "I'll see what I can do." It was quite clear that he hadn't quite understood all of that, but he did nod and give a brief "thanks", so Onni stored away this bizarre smattering of competence to analyse later before standing up to go seek a rather urgent chat with his cousin.

He found him sitting on a windowsill, much as a cat does as it watches the birds outside. Lalli looked at him with a careful blankness and greeted him with a nod. He sighed. "Lalli." The only response he got was a grunt and Lalli returning his gaze to some point outside the window. "Lalli. I'm sorry."

Lalli stiffened and looked back at him with a wariness which he supposed he deserved. What he wouldn't have given for some knowledge on how on deal with what his younger relatives needed. No. Younger relative. Singular. His eyes pricked again. Lalli was all he had left, now, and if he was going to do one thing right it would be patching this up.

"I wanted to tell you I know you did all you could."

Lalli's eyes were wide, his face still guarded.

"Lalli, I want you to know that I... I don't blame you for anything. We both lost somebody. Please, let's not... I don't want to lose any of what we have left."

He was not a man of great words, but he could see that something in what he said had caught a string somewhere, and Lalli unravelled in front of him. Lalli took a shuddering breath and blinked several times in a row. "Onni, if I had done better..."

Onni couldn't remember the last time he had hugged Lalli. Not since he had been a child. Not since they had both been children, really. Now that he was hugging him again, he reflected that perhaps this was another one of his many, many mistakes. He had certainly never leant onto him for support in the way he did now when he finally cried himself, letting grief make him limp and helpless. He felt Lalli's hands grip his back and the bodily memory it stirred - carrying him as an exhausted child into Keuruu for the first time while dragging his sister beside him by the hand, swearing to himself that he would make this journey worth it, that he would keep them safe - made him sob harder than he'd known was possible, hugging Lalli as close as he could, finally rooting within himself the knowledge that this young man in his arms was the last target of his protectiveness left. At some point the Västerström children could be heard approaching them, but someone - Siv? - herded them away. When he finally looked at Lalli, he could see that his face was also red and streaked with tears, and neither had anything to say as they looked at each other. After an endless moment of slowly recovering, Onni finally found it in him to continue. "Thank you for all you did for her."

"Of course I wouldn't risk her getting lost."

A pause.

"She found her way. I feel it."

"So do I."

They made a plan, then, for when they returned to Finland - prayers to say for Tuuri, and for safety, for what was left of their family. In a way, it was mage business, as usual. But it was also something one could only get from the other, now.

*

ADDENDUM

"So when did you get so protective of that Finnish boy?" Siv asked, an evil smile curling up at the sides of her mouth. "Around the time you decided you finally have an interest in languages?"

Emil rolled his eyes and cut himself his fourth slice of bread. " _Herregud_. Look. Nobody else looks after him. He's saved my life a few times. That's all it is."

"Mmm-hmm. Notice I didn’t even ask about that."

"You’re giving me that _face_ though! Stop smirking!"

"Well, he is very pretty, I suppose."

" _Aunt Siv!_ "

**Author's Note:**

> so, this was baby's first fanfic! I feel a little self-conscious about Onni's thoughts on the Icelandic language there, because I don't know how relatable that train of thought is for others, but it's all drawn from what I know, and I can't be the only one to have that relationship with language sometimes. Also, thanks, Synchronised Screaming people - at one point you were humouring me hanging around before I'd even written anything, maybe I'll make a habit of this and come back! Also thanks to thezonesystems for helping me with the odd bit of Swedish...


End file.
